The Australian Financial Review (Tuesday 27 July) two page article
Forest land deal a can of worms for Labor (You'll have to pay for it!)
on our most secretive
government business enterprise, Forestry Tasmania
and our most secretive state government, makes for a great read.
It seems that Forestry Tasmania and its political masters have been playing footloose and fancy free with taxpayers' assets and now has clammed up like a cornered recalcitrant child when some answers are sought to some rather probing questions about a land swap that does not seem to have been above board (in that it might have only been a one way transfer).
At the centre of the controversy is a reputed land transfer of crown land that was converted to freehold. This huge parcel of land (85,000 hectares on Forestry Tasmania figures but estimates go as high as 97,000 hectares) seems not to have made it to the Valuation Roll as all freehold land should.
While we mere mortals pay rates on our freehold land, Forestry Tasmania seem to have got their's for free. Imagine that, a giveaway of crown (taxpayer's) land converted to freehold, then gone from sight. Then the next obvious question is, who got the contracts to actually log it? No prizes there.
Forestry Tasmania was supposed to have transferred back an equivalent area of land to the State but why block all efforts to see if this has happened? What was the value put on the land? How much did Forestry Tasmania get for it? Why have all questions (some by Senator Shane Murphy and the auditor general) gone either unanswered or those answers given contradict each other?
Investigative journalists working for the Australian Financial Review and the ABC do not seem to have had much luck in getting any answers except stalling tactics and silence from Forestry Tasmania and the Labor Government.
I would like to see Minister Bryan Green smirk his way around this one while Paul Lennon contemplates exactly who to threaten.
An excerpt:
Forest land deal a can of worms for Labor
Annabel Day
2004/07/27
Tasmania is shaping up as a key battleground in this year's federal election and particularly for Opposition Leader Mark Latham, who is walking a fine line between the unions on one side and environmentalists on the other.
Just one of Tasmania's five federal seats is considered safe, the others are either marginal or just a few percentage points away and the debate over clearfelling of old-growth forests will galvanise pro-forestry and green voters across the country.
etc, etc,
But questions over a land transaction between 1997 and 2000 directed to the Labor state government threaten to embarrass Latham, a supporter of Tasmanian forest policy, and risk upsetting his delicate balancing act.
The transaction involved the transfer of what was initially thought to have been 77,000 hectares of crown land given to the government business enterprise Forestry Tasmania as freehold, allowing FT to sell the land without a public auction or notifying parliament, something it would probably not have been able to do if the land had remained crown. FT has since admitted about 85,000 hectares were vested in it as freehold and others believe the figure was closer to 97,000.
In exchange for the freehold titles, FT was to surrender land of equal value to the crown within three months. The questions centre on the lack of evidence that FT fulfilled its side of the deal by surrendering land of equal value - or any land at all. Also, much of the freehold land that FT was given had still not been added to the Valuation Roll, which records land values and is used to determine council rates, at the time of The Australian Financial Review's investigations, raising doubts over how the land was valued in the first instance and suggesting FT has not paid rates on it as other freehold owners do.
And a simpler question, which many feel has still not been answered: why did FT need freehold land in the first place?
etc, etc,
Aside from missing entries in the Valuation Roll, there is little proof that the land transaction involved anything untoward. But the government and FT, which is largely exempt from freedom-of-information laws, have ignored questions from the public, the media, other politicians and perhaps even the former Tasmanian Auditor-General, provided misleading, partial or conflicting answers or refused to provide answers at all.
etc, etc,
Former Tasmanian auditor-general Arthur McHugh last year instructed his office to look into the matter after he received queries from the public, but he never got anything back before his retirement last year.
"It has stayed at the background of my mind [because] we never got to the bottom of whether land of equal value was given back," he says. But McHugh says the fact he didn't get anything was due to his "own failure to follow up".
"I assumed that that stuff would be on their asset register ... and [it would be] relatively straightforward to say this was on the asset register at that time and it wasn't on there at that time and therefore QED." FT says it has no record of any such request from the auditor-general.
Forest land deal a can of worms for Labor (You'll have to pay for it!)
Eddie Storace "works as a process operator at Zinifex Hobart Smelter
(former Pasminco) and has worked in the mining industry for a total of twenty
years in Tasmania. I am also an AWU delegate. In my spare time I am a fourth year
law student and a member of the Tasmanian Greens since 1989. I stood in the 1992
State election on Di Hollister's ticket in the Braddon electorate and Di was elected
for a third term (just) which was a milestone considering Braddon is traditionally
Tasmania's most redneck electorate. I received 100 votes. I see my law studies
as a ticket out of wearing a hardhat, doing shiftwork and showering with 20 big hairy
blokes who hate Greens and steadfastly refuse to scrub my back. I am 44 years
old and have two children and live in Sandy Bay with one of them and Helen."
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Thursday, July 29, 2004